William Trewin: 'Rhoda Mountjoy is my niece. She has been staying with me on a visit for about three weeks

Arthur and Laurel had four children, all born in Footscray.

The first, a boy, was the fifth generation of this family to have Richard among his forenames. His first name, however, was Alan, and he was the first Honeycombe in the world to be so named. Alan was born on 25 February 1947.

Three daughters followed-Lynette, in 1951; Brenda, in 1961; and Dawn in 1965. In due course the three girls married, respectively - David Woodyard, a carpenter; David Phillips, a fitter and turner; and Ian Jeffrey, an overhead linesman. Brenda remarried, her second husband being a chauffeur, Malcolm Sellars, after her first husband, David Phillips, hanged himself in a black fit of depression in 1991.

Alan Honeycombe also produced four children when he married, as his father and great-grandfather had done; in his case two boys and two girls. A schoolteacher (BSc), Alan married a nurse, whose family came from the Netherlands. Christened Alberdina Maria Boudewyna Van Staveren, she was known at Beth. They married in Yallourn, east of Melbourne, on 6 December 1969, and settled eventually in Healseville. Their four children were Ross, born

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December 1970; Sharyn, born 1973; Christopher, born April 1976; and Danielle, born 1983. Sharyn married Julian Carroll, who worked for Toyota as a parts manager, in March 1995.

The story of his life and wasteful death is told, mainly by his father, in Afterwords. The loss to his family, and to all Honeycombes was the greater because, of all the sporting Honeycombes, Chris was likely to have achieved the most in the national and international scene. He was a champion swimmer, and might have competed for Australia, not just at the Commonwealth Games, but in Atlanta at the Olympic Games in 1996.

But one Australian Honeycombe has made his mark - as an international expert in metallurgy. Not only that, he was knighted by the Queen.

This was another Robert Honeycombe - Robert William Kerr Honeycombe, to be precise - who was born in Melbourne in 1921.

His grandfather George, the eldest son of Dirty Dick, had been born in Scotland at Edinburgh's seaport, Leith, in February 1853, and was three months old when Richard and Elizabeth Honeycombe, sailed on The Banker's Daughter from Bristol in May, bound for Geelong and taking young Jane, two-year-old Mary Ann and the infant George with them to that far corner of the globe.

The family later moved to Footscray in Melbourne, and in September 1880, when he was 26, George married Eliza Soutar in the more salubrious southeastern suburb of Prahran. She was a dressmaker, residing in Albion Street, South Yarra; he was a coach-painter. Of the four sons of Richard and Elizabeth, he was the only one not to go to South Africa and become caught up in the Boer War.

Eliza, if not George, had social pretensions as well as unorthodox religious convictions, and her four children were raised to be proper and socially correct; the whole family attended services of the independent Australian Church, and three of the children were married by the Church's charismatic leader, Dr Charles Strong - two of the daughters claiming to be younger than they were.

But before any of these events occurred, George died, in September 1913 in the Afred Hospital, having suffered from chronic nephritis (kidney disease) for several years; he was 60. At the time the family were living at 40 Albion Street, South Yarra, and none of the four children - William, 31; May, 29; Louisa, 28; and Nancy, 24 - had married and left home.

William, born in December 1881, had fulfilled parental expectations by being a dutiful student and becoming an accountant. He was talented as well as clever, and while at South Yarra State School, and aged 14, won prizes for his schoolwork. He then trained as an accountant and was sufficiently well established to marry above himself in March 1920, when he was 38. His bride was Rachel Annie Kerr, the 33-year-old daughter of a JP, Robert Kerr, described

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The couple moved into a smart villa called Blythewood in Kooyong Road, Caulfield, Melbourne, where they lived for five years, during which their two children, a son and a daughter, Robert and Marjorie, were born. Father William qualified as a company auditor in February 1923, two months before his aged grandfather, Richard Honeycombe, aged 93, rode in the Eight Hours Day procession and was pictured in the Sun. Later that year William's great-uncle, John Honeycombe, died in Kalgoorlie.

When old Richard died, in July 1925, William went to live with his wife and two children in Geelong. It must be coincidence that William chose to move house that year, back to the place where Richard settled after sailing to Australia, and where the Mountjoys had flourished and William's greatgrandfather and namesake had lived for most of the latter part of his life. Surely William was aware that his father George had lived in Geelong as a child? But was he aware, when he occupied a villa in Newtown, at 92 Prospect Road, that the Honeyoombes had lived a few hundred yards away, in Noble Street and Skene Street, and that Roslyn and Fernside over at Highton had once been home to old William and Jane?

It was in Geelong, appropriately, that young Robert's particular brilliance was nurtured and that he began to shine - his heightened intelligence and incisive mind owing something perhaps to the infusion of Scottish genes from his mother, grandmother, and even Elizabeth Ryder.

Born on 2 May 1921, he became Dux of the Swanston Street State School in Geelong aged 10 and won a scholarship to Geelong College. In the same year (1931) he passed a London College of Music examination with honours and received a gold medal; he came second in elocution in a Geelong competition and second in a Temperance essay competition for the Western District. Specialising in scientific subjects, he won the Dixson Research Scholarship in Engineering to Melbourne University, where he achieved his BSc degree in 1940 and his MSc in 1942, graduating with honours in metallurgy - all before he was 21. The Argus Research Scholarship in Engineering was added to his list and in 1942 he joined the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) and became a resident tutor at Trinity College; he was also the co-author of two papers which were published in the proceedings of the Royal Society, London, and of several papers on metallurgical research in other English and Australian journals. Along the way he became engaged to a girl studying for her BSc, June Collins, the youngest daughter of Mr and Mrs LW Collins of North Road, Gardenvale, a southern suburb of Melbourne.

On 21 March 1945, aged 23, Robert Honeycombe, MSc, delivered a lecture on The Science of Metals' at the Bostock Hall. The previous week his parents had celebrated their silver wedding, with announcements in Geelong and Melbourne papers. William the accountant was 63.

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He had recently become a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Cost Accountants. But what may have pleased William most later on in 1945 was the acceptance of two of his water colours - 'Daly's Lane' and 'The Old Quarry1 (both in Geelong) for showing at the Victorian Artists' Spring Show at the Albert Street Galleries, East Melbourne. Two other paintings were also exhibited at the Spring Exhibition the following year. William had been painting local landscapes for many years, as well as pursuing another interesting hobby, astronomy. In the back yard of his Newtown home was a giant 12-inch reflecting telescope. For many years, in the tradition of his craftsman forebears, he had also been a freemason, having been installed as the Master of the Geelong Lodge in September 1934 and then later as Master of the Barwon Lodge of Mark Master Masons.

Meanwhile, William's only son Robert had married June Collins, BSc, in December 1947, and had taken up a three-year ICI fellowship at Cambridge University, to carry out research into metal physics.

In 1950 he was awarded a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) and was engaged in research at the Cavendish Laboratory. Lecturing at Sheffield University between 1951 and 1955, he became a professor and moved back to Cambridge, where he became a Fellow of Trinity Hall in 1966. Further honours and achievements enhanced his reputation over the years and Hardwick, near Cambridge, became his home; he called his house 'Barrabool'. His two daughters, Juliet and Celia, were born in Cambridge in 1950 and 1953. Robert became a Fellow of the Royal Society and, a singular honour for an Australian, Warden of the Goldsmiths, an ancient London guild, in 1986. He appeared in Who's Who, the first Honeycombe to be included therein, and was knighted by the Queen in Buckingham Palace in 1990 - the first Honeycombe ever to be dubbed a 'Sir1.

And so the legend of the Norman knight called Honi a Combat, who fought for William I in 1066, achieved a sort of reality over 900 years later, in the shape of an Australian from Geelong who knew everything there was to know about the internal structure of metals and alloys of every type.

But Sir Robert Honeycombe produced no male heirs, and so the name -as more often than not these days - dies out with him. It is a notable feature of the family tree that over the centuries more daughters have been born than sons, and that of those sons who marry, some have few or no children, or

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Another Australian line that has come to an end was begun by Tom Honeycombe, Richard the stonemason's third son, the stonecutter who went to South Africa and died in Melbourne on his return, in 1901.

He was 41 when he died. He had married Catherine Morris in Adelaide when they were both 20 years old. Presumably he was working there at the time. They were living in Melbourne in 1881, and it was there that their three children were born. Two were boys; and although both married and had children - and neither served in the First World War - within two generations another branch of the family tree and named Honeycombe had ceased to grow.

The first son was George Henry, born in August 1881. He married Bertha Madden at St Stephen's, Richmond, by licence in May 1915, when he was 33 and she was 26. George was a clerk, as was Bertha's father, and he was then living in Queen's Parade, North Fitzroy. He went on to become Town Clerk of Fitzroy and must have been able to provide his only child, a boy, with a good start in life. But that son, another Tom, born in March 1916, did not capitalise on this and remained socially and comfortably where he was.

A sergeant in the infantry during the war, Tom married Robina Morrish, known as Bena, in December 1940. This wedding took place at Knox Church, Ivanhoe: Tom, a clerk, and living with his parents at 247 Scotchmer St, North Fitzroy, was 24; Bena was 19. Devoted to each other, they were a happy and handsome pair.

Their only child, a boy, was born in April 1948, eight years before his father died. Called Warwick, he became a marketing manager, and six years after his mother remarried, Warwick married Lucy Guy, in February 1977. They had no children; and so the Thomas/George/Thomas/Warwick line came to an end.

Tom the stonecutter's second son, also called Tom (Thomas Gordon), was born in January 1889. He was a sales rep or 'traveller1, apparently dealing with glassware and dealing with hotels; during the war he was a draughtsman in a munition's factory. Although this Tom married twice, his first wife being a cousin of the MacRobertson family, he failed to advance socially, even regressing a bit. His second wife, Nell Hughes, was considerably taller than him. He only had one daughter, Audrey (by his first wife), who was born in November 1917.

In January 1980, this Audrey, then Audrey Forsyth, and aged 62, wrote to Bob Honeycombe in Charters Towers.

She had recently been received into the Catholic Church in Sydney and the priest who admitted her was a Father Peter McHugh. When she told him her maiden name was Honeycombe, he said some of his relations in Queensland were Honeycombes. Indeed they were. For Paddy McHugh was related through

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One other family of Honeycombes emigrated to Australia: Samuel Honeycombe and four of his sisters.

They were part of a lowly mining family who lived near Calstock in Cornwall in the 19th century and were descended from Jonathan Honeycombe. He was born in 1709 in St Cleer the second son of Matthew, who was himself the only begetter of all of the Honeycombes alive in the world today.

Jonathan's eldest son was another Matthew. He married Deborah Deeble in 1755 in Calstock, thus re-establishing his family's connection with their ancestral village. Honeycombes had lived in and around Calstock since 1327.

The village was stacked up on the steep and Cornish south-facing slope of the River Tamar, which had formed a natural boundary between Devon and Cornwall for many centuries and had borne a busy trade on its slow-winding waters, from quay to quay across the river (the first bridge across it was at Gunnislake, north of Calstock) and up and down the 19 miles of its well-wooded tidal length, from Gunnislake to Plymouth. Calstock was never a market town, and was little more than a manorial village, a crossing-point and a trading centre, from where granite, sand and limestone quarried from minor valleys and moors, as well as strawberries, cherries and vegetables, found their way downstream on barges to the naval city of Plymouth.

In the nineteenth century all these activities boomed, along with paper mills, brickworks, tile works, a brewery, a tannery, ship-building - and mining. By 1865 about 17 mines within five miles of Calstock were producing quantities of copper and tin, arsenic, manganese, silver and lead. At the height of the mining boom, over 100 mines were in operation in or near the Tamar Valley, served by many ancillary trades, such as carpenters, masons, ropemakers, blacksmiths, boilermakers and foundrymen. Calstock had over a quarter of a mile of quays; a shipping company was registered there, and paddle steamers surged up and down the river, some carrying people on day excursions. There was constant noise: of thumping paddle-wheels, of whistles, hooters, clanking mine-engines and water-wheels, of people at play and people at work.

This was the world known more to Matthew and Deborah's grandchildren, rather than to their children, of whom there were eight, among them five surviving sons: John, Matthew, William, Robert and Richard.

Three generations later, the male line of descent from this John, Matthew and Richard had died out. But the children of William (b. 1763) and Robert (b.1769) flourished. It was their descendants who went to Australia, led there by Robert's only surviving son, William (b. 1797), who became a stonemason, moved to Bristol, emigrated in 1850 and settled in Geelong.

His story has already been told. His uncle William (Robert's older brother) was a fisherman, an unusual trade for a Honeycombe.

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William, or Will, as the 1871 census calls him, grew up unable to write nor probably read at a time when the neighbouring continent was convulsed by the Napoleonic wars. His year of birth saw Bonaparte in Egypt and the Battle of the Nile; he was two when the parliaments union of Great Britain and Ireland took place; Spain declared war on Britain when he was six, and the Battle of Trafalgar and Nelson's death, in October 1805, happened when Will was seven. The death of Pitt, the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the overthrow of Prussia, the French invasion of Portugal, Spain and the threatened invasion of England followed. Will was 14 in 1812, and 17 at the time of Waterloo.

One of JMW Turner's most famous paintings, Crossing the Brook, was exhibited in the Royal Academy that year. An amalgam of different aspects of the Tamar Valley, drawn on a tour of the West that Turner made about 1812, it includes a distant new of the bridge at Gunnislake, the mill and the tower of Calstock Church. One critic scoffed at its 'pea-green insipidity'.

George III, Britain's longest reigning king, died in January 1820. He and Queen Charlotte and three of their daughters had visited the Tamar Valley in August 1789, and had breakfast with the Earl and Countess of Mount Edgcumbe in Cotehele. The 1820s saw the birth of trade unionism, of steam-ships and trains, and the marriage in Calstock Church in April 1827 of Will and Anne Williams, seven years younger than he.

She provided William with eleven known children, eight of whom were girls. Samuel, born in July 1847, was the youngest boy.

The Census of 1841, made the year after the young Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and in the year that Hong Kong was acquired by Britain, shows William and Anne, who had married in the parish church of Calstock in April 1827, living near Gunnislake.

According to Frank Booker, in 77?e Tamar Valley. 'The emergence of Calstock as a nineteenth century mining centre begins with the discovery in the 1770s of the rich copper deposits running eastwards under the river to the Devon bank'. On the Cornish bank, just south of the bridge across the Tamar, a mine was opened up at Gunnislake. By 1800 it had brought a fortune to the Williams family of Scorrier, who had already profited from their western mining interests at Gwennap, between Truro and Redruth. Booker writes: 'John Williams put up cottages for his workmen, each with a garden large enough for a pig. He also developed quarries in the area, seeking contracts for the stone in Devonport and Plymouth. The family grip on the neighbourhood became so

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complete that between 1816 and 1821 the alternative name for Gunnislake was Williams Town.'

A different family connection arose in due course when Edward Williams rebuilt Honeycombe House, bought by his grandfather in 1806. His brother, Michael Williams, MP had bought Caerhays Castle in 1855. Edward Williams put his initials and the date on the front-door porch - 'EW 1856' - and when he died, aged 73, a stained glass window was installed in Calstock Church bearing the legend: 'In Loving Memory of Edward Williams of Honicombe House Esq... March 1892'.

There is no memorial to any Honeycombe in the church, nor any to the many Honeycombes buried there - except for one slate gravestone to William Honeycombe, who was buried in the churchyard in February 1830, aged 41.

One wonders whether Edward Williams ever came across Will Honeycombe the miner or any of his children, and on learning their surname inquired: 'Honeycombe? How quaint. That's the name of my house. Did you ever live there? No? It must have been a very longtime ago...'

In 1841, Will the miner was 42 and his wife Anne 35. The Census recorded they had four surviving children: Elizabeth, William, Ann and Hannah. Another boy, born in 1832, had died two years later. Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was 14. There is no mention, however, in the Census, of their second daughter, Mary Jane, who was 12 in March, 1841. Presumably she was away on a visit, or working (as a servant?) in another parish. Three other children are recorded: William (8), Ann (4), and Hannah (2).

Two other Honeycombes lived nearby: Deborah and her widowed mother, Elizabeth. Her husband, Richard, another copper miner, had died in 1838. And in Calstock itself, there was old Jane Honeycombe, aged 81 and widow of Matthew. She was living near her bachelor sons, John and Matthew, aged 49 and 46, and both stonemasons. All three were dead within six years, John and Matthew dying within a month of each other.

Next door to them was the family of their eldest sister, Ann, born in 1786, who had married Moses Williams. At the time of the next Census, in 1851, she was on her own, aged 65 (not 63 as the Census says) and is described as a 'nurse'.

By this time, Will and Anne Honeycombe, now 52 and 45, were at Middle Dimson, a collection of cottages near Gunnislake.

They had now had five more children, four of whom survived: Eliza, Louisa, Samuel and Harriet. Their two eldest daughters, Elizabeth and Mary Jane had married copper-miners and were living nearby, if not actually next door. Their husbands were Charles Glasson and John Ennor. The letter's father, James Ennor, also a copper-miner, was born in St Agnes, as was Anne

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Turner's romantic vision of the Tamar Valley was by now only true of its scenery, best seen from the little paddle-steamers that surged up and down the river on regular trips and excursions. The urban sprawl around Plymouth had topped 100,000 by 1850 and the excursion habit was now at its height. Steamers for river outings were as much in use as coaches are today and continued to be chartered by philanthropic, religious, and all manner of organisations until the First World War, despite the advent of trains.

The West Cornwall railway ran cheap excursions in the summer, one of their most ambitious being a train of 84 carriages, propelled by three engines, which took over a thousand people from Truro to Penzance in August 1855. Teetotal societies provided most of the passengers, as well as seven accompanying bands, banners and flags. Brunei's railway bridge across the Tamar at Plymouth was officially opened by Prince Albert in May 1859, and Mr Thomas Cook of Leicester took full advantage of this by arranging an excursion the following year from Scotland to Land's End.

Calstock added some of the craft to the traffic on the Tamar. Between 1830 and 1860, a schooner, a steamer, two sloops and five river-boats were built there.

But it was not until the turn of the century that ship-building reached a peak of activity, centred on the Goss Brothers yard on the Devon bank, where ketches, schooners, barges, cutters, skiffs and gigs were made and launched until the 1930s. The sights and sounds of steamers and sailing-ships were commonplace at Calstock for most of the nineteenth century, as they were in Cornwall's sea-ports. Falmouth was the biggest and busiest. On 1 February 1861 The West Briton recorded: 'The vessels in the harbour awaiting orders amounted to 300... The casualties have been very few and of very slight character, not withstanding the sudden and various charges of the wind'.